


time as a symptom of love

by bittybelle



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Epilogue, Gen, Gen Work, slight Yara/Dany
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-26
Updated: 2019-05-26
Packaged: 2020-03-19 23:41:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18980752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bittybelle/pseuds/bittybelle
Summary: Yara has never believed in anything so much as she believes in the present.“Heard tell of White Walkers, a few months back. That true?”Brienne falls asleep every night filled with an emotion she has no name for.Sansa has a child, nine years into her reign.Four women, after the song of ice and fire has concluded.





	time as a symptom of love

**Author's Note:**

> Because I really just need them to be happy. Title taken from Joanna Newsom's Time, As a Symptom.

 

It doesn’t take long for Yara to decide that if the North can be free, so can the Islands. Bran, in his vacant way, agrees. No one else does. Yara doesn’t much care. She takes to the sea and decides that if they feel strongly enough, they can get on a ship themselves and ask her somewhere other than King’s fucking Landing.

 

She thinks of Daenerys often. She was beautiful, of course, and Yara has toyed with thoughts of that long and lustrous hair wound ‘round her brine-stained fingers, the soot she might have found in the folds of that gleaming body. But she thinks too of the woman who reigned like a man, a woman with dreams of a better world without ever having seen one. Yara thinks she might have been capable of loving a woman like that.

 

But it’s done with, and Yara has never believed in anything so much as she believes in the present. So she has her favorite whittler make her a crown of driftwood which she barely ever wears, and a jerkin with clever leather pleating, to mimic the crabs she’d so loved to watch as a tidepool-mad girl. She hosts a man named Salladhor Saan for a night, and they discuss what lies near the coast of Sothoryos. She makes plans for Asshai, for Leng, for the enameled ports of Yi Ti.

 

And when she catches her men ripping the dresses from weeping girls, she chops a finger off and sends it to the deep. For the dragon queen and her high ideals of a world where she could rule.

 

 

* * *

 

 

What’s immediately west of Westeros is an island like a saucer, sloping towards a central depression in which a lighthouse stands. The woman inside is old, with eyes as green and insubstantial as celery, but she says she doesn’t need to see to keep the flame alive.

 

“Why do you do it?” Arya tears the flatbread the woman presents her with into small, secretive bites. She hasn’t lost that scrounger’s habit and she doesn’t think she’ll try to. “There can’t be too many ships out here.”

 

“You came.”

 

“Normal people, I mean.”

 

“Well, there’s more folks out there who aren’t normal than you’d think.” The woman stretches, scratches. “Girls like you with big last names, girls with none. Had a prince once, but I think he was lying.”

 

Arya watches her crew out the wobbled glass of the sole window. Only eight, but they’ve taken up as much of the island’s lush green grass as they can. “Did you always live here?”

 

“Came when I was a girl. Someone had to, and I never really wanted to go back. Mother was from Crackclaw Point, figured I’d understand the sea soon enough.”

 

“Do you know what’s west of here?”

 

The woman works at the bread with her remaining teeth. “I’ve heard of a city of men without blood, shambling around half-dead. Some people say there are serpents who can talk. I think that’s shit. Mostly just sea, I expect. Sea monsters.”

 

“I’m not afraid of sea monsters.”

 

“No.” The woman almost seems to see her, for a moment. “Heard tell of White Walkers, a few months back. That true?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Heard of a girl with a skinny sword who killed their king.”

 

Arya swallows the last of the bread. She fixes the woman with a gaze that, years ago, would have been penetrating. The sea wind has sanded away its malice. “Yes.”

 

The woman grins. “Probably no sea monster alive who could scare that girl, I figure.”

 

* * *

  
  
Brienne falls asleep every night filled with an emotion she has no name for. She is grateful and she is bewildered. There are men who look to her for command. She is a favorite at Dornish tables. She asks Pod twice if they are laughing at her, and though he insists that their ways are different, she doesn’t quite believe him until she starts being sent Dornish daughters, all scraped knees and terrible form, who’ve been told to seek out the woman who leads the Kingsguard.

 

“I can’t teach you,” she says, wariness scrabbling at the back of her throat. “I don’t have the time.”

 

“You do,” Bran says, as Pod wheels him past, because King Bran the Broken is nothing if not a man of impeccable timing. “Your mornings are empty.”

 

They are, of course. So she begins her days with her usual exercises, her light breakfast of eggs and the Highgarden melons that are her only indulgence, and her prayers to the seven. It’s just that now, a gaggle of children attend her with a hushed sort of awe she feels prickling at her like badly carded wool. She doesn’t instruct, really. They just do what she does, then Pod takes them to do whatever it is he takes them to do, and she forgets they exist until the next morning.

 

The Dornish prince visits, finally, amidst murmurings of secession. No one has dared to take on Yara’s Iron Fleet since she declared herself queen, and though the Dornish lack her homicidal glee, no one wants to chance it. He requests her presence in his quarters after dinner, and she finds herself there, armor denting the plush armchairs of his suite, holding an absurdly fine goblet of Arbor gold.

 

“How are you finding your…” He smiles, in a feline sort of way. “Your charges?”

 

“The Dornish girls?”

 

“Yes. Are they any better with their swords than when we sent them to you? Ineria showed the most promise, but gods, how she knows it.”

 

“They are…” Brienne feels an old stone roll around in her belly, one that she’d thought fixed at last. “Progressing. I suppose.”

 

The prince examines her. She has grown to loathe this naked sort of appraisal almost more than sniggering, almost more than outright cruelty. _Well goodness, there you really are_ , they seem to be thinking, and she can’t turn away from that like she’d been able to more naked insults. It is her royal duty to sit and nod and absorb them as something adjacent to a compliment. “Ineria is my niece.”

 

“How nice.”

 

“She was miserable. Always was. Colicky baby, and she never had much luck with friends.”

 

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

 

“Some girl--Rina? Lina? Some name like that, one of your other charges.”

 

“Rina.” Red hair, atrocious swing, chipped front tooth. “Rina Dayne, I believe.”

 

The prince nods, then smiles. “She introduced me to her yesterday. Only for a second though, because then they were off like alley cats, doing...well, the gods only know. Banging their practice swords against every doorway.”

 

“I’ll see that they’re reprimanded.”

 

The prince nods, still smiling, then knocks back his wine in one swift gulp. “I’d not like a child of Dorne to gain a reputation as the scourge of Fleabottom.”

 

The next morning, the girls report. They eat their eggs, plates clashing at the small table Pod set aside for them. They make obscure jokes she doesn’t understand, hitch up trousers they have badly mended. Ineria drags her wooden sword along the cobbles as they stride towards the training ground. Brienne stops, and she hears the girls clatter to a halt behind her.

 

“Ineria Martell,” she says, turning with the slowness her father had once assumed with her. “You will stop that at once.”

 

Ineria’s eyes go wide as sand dollars. “Ser?”

 

“Treating your sword like that.” Gods, but they were small. Brienne sees Rina swallow, watches a girl whose name she can’t recall struggle against the urge to scratch at a rash. “A knight’s sword is not a toy. It is an instrument of honor.”

 

“Yes, Ser.”

 

“Very good.” Brienne turns and heads forward. She’ll need to ask the smith for blunted blades as well, and gods, how they needed new practice shields. The girls have no defensive skills, and it really is best to learn early.

 

* * *

  
  
Sansa has a child, nine years into her reign. Her maester and her ladies knew, but none other. They did clever things with her skirts until she grew too large to hide, and then she was vaguely ill, and then most of Winterfell heard her scream. Only once, one long, curved crescent of a scream, gone too high to sustain. Then silence.

 

The next day, as Sansa feeds her daughter, she considers what to do. Not about her girl, who she is thinking of naming Catelyn, her face already set in a priggish pout, but in what order to present the princess to her people. Winterfell, of course, then a grand banquet for her lords and ladies. But who of the household first? Maester Olifer, perhaps, so he can examine how she is progressing? Or Alyce, who was so convinced the baby’s russet birthmark was a fell omen they must heed by drinking barley tea for thirteen days?

 

In the end, everyone comes through more or less at once. Sansa had, at least, done up the front of her dress again, and had her ladies dress her hair. She sits by the window, her princess in her arms, sleeping with a thin nasal drone Sansa already adores. Her cooks and smiths and cobblers, their children, the closest lords still dusted with snow from their frantic gallops up the road: Sansa nods at each in turn, and promises a feast in which she can present the child properly. A grand tourney, perhaps, with at least five fools and a joust and lemoncakes by the platterful.

 

“Your grace,” Maester Olifer says, after everyone has gone and he has pronounced the Queen to be healing well. “What will you say of…”

 

“Her father?”

 

The Maester grimaces. “Well, yes.”

 

She liked Olifer immediately. He doesn’t delight in scolding his pupils the way so many maesters do, and he deems no information beneath or above her notice. He was the first to know she was with child, and he is the only one to know that the father is no lord or knight or clandestine betrothal but a wildling friend of Jon’s, who she went to for a child and a total disinterest in ruling.

 

“I think,” Sansa says, watching her daughter’s eyes flick back and forth beneath their lunar lids, “that I will need some time to decide.”

 

The people do not always love their Queen. She knows this now, knows that the North demands she earn their respect over and over again throughout her lifetime. But she keeps them from dying in lands with the wrong gods. She outlasted the Lannisters, the Boltons, the Walkers, and the dragon queen. She keeps taxes low and she puts away grain like they’ll never have another summer.

 

So when she presents Princess Catelyn on a day when sunshine floods the North like snowmelt and she names no man as King, consort, or father, they kneel before the Queen in the North and say what a fine little wolf cub she has borne.

 

* * *

  
  
There was a silver princess on a moon-bright mare. There was a Dothraki bitch with a dragon’s wrath. There was a breaker of chains who was the coming of the Lord, but the darkness got to her first. There was a mad queen who broke the world and gods be good, she never came back.

 

There are cities she had been. There are men who spit whenever they speak of her. There are men who call her name in their sleep. There are places that forget her name, and places that remember her with fondness, and places that never knew dragons returned to life at all.

 

There is a member of the dosh khaleen who speaks of a pale khaleesi, who took her bloodriders across the world and never returned to the great grass sea.

 

There are former bedslaves who roll their eyes when men spit on the queen’s name, who trade tales of her feats over cups of tea shared in quiet kitchens.

 

There are mothers who tell their daughters, _you know, I met her myself. I was a cook in the great pyramid, and I remember, she loved rockfish with peppers._

 

There are people who never stop listening for the beating of a dragon’s wings.

 


End file.
